At the very start of the year I proposed a task for you to work on: de-compose an auto or home advertisement or television show. I was trying to get you to think about perspective as it applies to angle of view.
WPPI's (Wedding and Portrait Photography) big shindig is coming up in March, and one of the things that got me thinking about that first photography task was that I wanted to attend this year and work on my own people photography skills. Besides interacting with your subject, there's the whole decision about how you're handling perspective and angle of view stylistically. I've been grappling with whether to keep the 85mm f/1.2 S or the 135mm f/1.8 S, and that's part of the issue I'm trying to figure out. It's not likely I'd use and carry both, so...
One of the reasons I pointed to video for your first task was that DPs (director of photography) and directors there spend a great deal of time thinking about this. They'll storyboard what they want things to look like, then re-assess on set, and still be arguing about it in the edit.
Of course, one thing that videographers are doing is trying to piece together multiple clips in a way that isn't just a bunch standoffish wide angle viewpoints that create a boring and uninteresting series. Clips that'll assemble together without jarring the viewer. (Feature films sometimes violate that purposefully, to emphasize a mood or set the viewer on edge. Note the odd jump cuts at the beginning of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, for example.)
What you probably don't know is that there's an incredible amount of literature covering the various things you can do with lens choice and camera position in film and video, and directors are always looking for ways to re-invigorate the basics. If you're interested, there's a series of books, Master Shots, volumes 1 through 3, that provide 300 different ways to set up the camera/subject relationship. In the photography world, crickets on the same subject, basically.
Where the videographers and filmmakers share information and ideas incessantly, still photographers seem reluctant to expose what they're doing with camera/subject relationships. Rick Sammon had a book called Camera Angles back in 1994, and I've seen a few others along the way, but for the most part, camera/subject relationship isn't really a thing that gets written about a lot these days. Heaven help you if you don't have 0.01EV more dynamic range or missed focus by a fraction of a inch, but posing and dealing with subjects is something that doesn't seem to attract the gear heads that inhabit most of the photography sites these days. I'll have more to say on the subject later in the year.
If you are interested in the camera/subject relationship in the meantime, I can heartily recommend WPPI (and bring your camera!). This year's show is at the Mirage in Las Vegas from March 3-7. As a bonus, the expo floor at WPPI is where you're likely to find all the new gear that was announced in Japan at CP+ a couple of weeks earlier.
